It all started with this photo on Gena’s Instagram feed. Gena is the author of the excellent blog The Full Helping, and she has long extolled the virtues of the vegetable nori roll as a quickly and easily assembled snack: her site offers almost a dozen examples, including this latest version.

The process is not unlike that which leads to maki, but here you forgo the seasoned rice altogether — this saves time and effort, and also means you don’t have to plan ahead — in favor of fresh vegetables, lots of them.

I was so inspired by that latest shot that I went out and got some cucumbers and sprouts the very next day to make my own, and I have been weaving variations on that theme about twice a week since then — that’s how enthused I am.

Although Gena likes to apply a thick layer of some sort of spread — think hummus or cashew cheese — directly on the nori sheet, I start with the sliced cucumbers as I prefer my nori to stay as crisp as possible* — the drier, the crisper — and find it most pleasing to bite into the crunchy layer of cucumbers first.

My Take on Nori Roll

Having played around with various ingredients, I have now determined the foundation I like to build on (cucumber, avocado, sprouts, sesame), and will add whatever little things I have on hand — leftover chicken or fish, tofu, spread or dressing, crudités, greens, and herbs. I have a great fondness for the mango and jicama version I make as an affectionate nod to the maki served at Bob’s Kitchen.

These make for a lovely item to add to the mix when we’re composing a lunch or dinner from sundry elements (see “leftovers night” in my Menu Planning Tips & Tricks). You could offer them as finger food as well, cut into maki-style slices, and I’ve been known to fix myself a nori roll as a refreshing afternoon treat, too.

* For optimal texture, I like to eat the roll the moment it is made, but of course it’s fine to let it sit while you make the others, or if you’re packing them for lunch at the office or a picnic.

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These days our produce guy is all about tomatoes — big and small, ribbed, smooth, or pointy, red, yellow, green, or pearl — and at the rate I’m going, I am bound to turn into one very soon. I’ve been making tomato salads and sandwiches like they’re going out of style, I’ve been making tomato tarts and tomato tarragon bread soup, and I’ve been mixing batches of gazpacho.

(My two stand-by tomato tarts are the tomato tart tatin and the tomato mustard tart respectively featured in my first and second cookbooks. Get yourself a copy of Chocolate & Zucchini and of The French Market Cookbook today!)

Another one of my top uses for this tomato bounty is shakshuka, a preparation that can be found in slightly different incarnations across North Africa and the Middle East. My first encounter with it was in Janna Gur’s excellent Book of New Israeli Food, which I told you about here and here, and I have since become acquainted with the Tunisian version as well.

A not-so-distant cousin of Provence’s ratatouille, Corsica’s pebronata, and the Basque piperade, shakshuka is most commonly a dish of tomatoes stewed with onions, bell peppers, and chili peppers. This forms a thickish sauce, in which eggs are cooked — either scrambled or (my preference) undisturbed so they’re halfway between poached and sunny side up.

It is a simple, family-style dish that is quickly assembled, and highly flexible.

You can:
– add other vegetables, especially zucchini or eggplant that you’ll cook in the sauce; artichoke hearts, drained from a jar; and diced potatoes, which you should boil beforehand,
– substitute quality canned tuna or merguez (spicy beef sausages) for the eggs,
– garnish the dish with black olives and parsley or cilantro, as I like to do, or serve it plain,
– serve the sauce with lamb skewers or other grilled meats (just not pork, for cultural consistency),
– freeze the sauce for later use: think how thrilling it will be to eat shakshuka in November!

Some recipes call for roasting the bell peppers first, which is good if you find them hard to digest, but I don’t think anyone wants to fire up the oven more than strictly necessary when it’s hot out. Others suggest you peel the tomatoes, but it seems unnecessarily fussy to me.

If your spice rack boasts a Moroccan spice mix, such as ras el hanout, now would be a good time to use it, in place of the separate spices (cumin, caraway, paprika, turmeric, and cinnamon) I’ve included. And if you don’t have a mix, and you don’t have all the spices listed either, don’t worry about it too much and just use what you have.

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This easy recipe for doenjang glazed eggplant is a wonderful first foray into Korean cooking.

For years now I’ve been contemplating Korean cuisine with equal parts excitement and trepidation. I’ve been going out to Korean restaurants, noting how vibrant the flavors and how nuanced the preparations, but I haven’t done very much at home.

Regular batches of homemade kimchi, yes, and kimchi fried rice, but that’s about it — until I received a review copy of Judy Joo’s Korean Food Made Simple.

Judy Joo is a Korean-American chef with a few restaurants and television shows to her name, and this is her first book, in which she shares 100+ recipes for Korean classics, plus a few East-meets-West creations.

It is the most un-intimidating book of Korean cooking I’ve seen in a while. The section on Korean staples alone is worth memorizing, and the recipes all feel very approachable. I look forward to tackling the noodles with black bean sauce (jjajangmyun), the roasted pork belly lettuce wraps (bossam), and the caramel doenjang ice cream, to name just a few.

But as a lover of all things eggplant, the first recipe I did try was for doenjang glazed aubergines, a Korean take on the Japanese classic nasu dengaku.

Instead of using miso paste, this recipe calls for the Korean equivalent, doenjang, a fermented soybean paste that is dark brown, richly flavored, and coarser than your average miso. (You should be able to find it at your local Asian market, and you can substitute red miso if that’s easier to find.)

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I will own up to it right then and there: I am an inveterate collector of pasta. Guilty as charged.

In fine food shops and Italian markets, I love to study the different shapes and imagine which will lend themselves to smooth sauces or chunky ones. I love their names (rooster’s crests, radiators, little ears, thimbles), the traditional packaging, and the fact that, for just a few euros, I can treat myself to a package of something novel — not to mention the promise of an easy meal.

Before I had children, I had to rein in my purchases, as my kitchen cabinets overflowed faster that Maxence and I actually ate pasta. But with two young boys who would eat it at every meal if I let them — their dream breakfast is cold leftover pasta, a recessive trait for sure — I am free to buy whatever I please, knowing I will easily find a use for it.

And I recently fell hard for a package of lumaconi, those large snail-shaped pasta sold in big bulging packages that scream “Buy me, I’m special!”

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